David Wallace - Infinite jest

When Orin does his impression of Avril — which I doubt you or anyone else can get him to do anymore, though it was a party-stopper back in our days at the Academy — what he will do is assume an enormous warm and loving smile and move steadily toward you until he is in so close that his face is spread up flat against your own face and c. Yes — all right — this may start to touch on it: not “ val uable” but “val ued. ”your breaths mingle. If you can get to experience it — the impression — which will seem worse to you: the smothering proximity, or the unimpeachable warmth and love with which it’s effected?

For some reason now I am thinking of the sort of philanthropist who seems humanly repellent not in spite of his charity but because of it: on some level you can tell that he views the recipients of his charity not as persons so much as pieces of exercise equipment on which he can develop and demonstrate his own virtue. What’s creepy and repellent is that this sort of philanthropist clearly needs privation and suffering to continue, since it is his own virtue he prizes, instead of the ends to which the virtue is ostensibly directed.

Everything Orin’s mother is about is always terribly well-ordered and multivalent. I suspect she was badly abused as a child. I have nothing concrete to back this up.

But if, Ms. Bainbridge, you have yielded your own charms to Orin, and if Orin strikes you as a wonderfully gifted and giving lover — which by various accounts he is — not just skilled and sensuous but magnificently generous, empathic, attentive, loving — if it seems to you that he does, truly, derive his own best pleasure from giving you pleasure, you might wish to reflect soberly on this vision of Orin imitating his dear Moms as philanthropist: a person closing in, arms open wide, smiling.

[270] ® The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH.

[271] (including K. McKenna, who claims to have a bruised skull but does not in fact have a bruised skull)

[272] This is why Ann Kittenplan, way more culpable for Eschaton-damage than any of the other kids, isn’t down here on the punitive cleanup crew, is that it’s become a defacto Tunnel Club operation. LaMont Chu was nominated to tell her she could blow it off and they’d mark her down as present, which was just fine with Ann Kittenplan, since even the butchest little girls don’t seem to have this proto-masculine fetish for enclosure underneath things.

[273] = Stars, shooting stars, falling stars.

[274]Poutrincourt uses the Nuck idiom réflechis instead of the more textbook reflexes, and does indeed sound like the real Canadian McCoy, though her accent is without the long moany suffixes of Marathe, and but anyway it is for certain that a certain ‘journalist’ will be e-mailing Falls Church VA on the U.S.O.’s Clipper-proof line for the unexpurgated files on one ‘Poutrincourt, Thierry T.’

[275] Using s’annuler instead of the more Québecois se détruire.

[276] Using the vulgate Québecois transperçant, whose idiomatic connotation of doom Poutrincourt shouldn’t have had any reason to think the Parisian-speaking Steeply would know, which is the slip that indicates that Poutrincourt’s figured out that Steeply is neither a civilian soft-profiler nor even a female, which Poutrincourt’s probably known ever since Steeply’d lit his Flanderfume with the elbow of his lighter-arm out instead of in, which only males and radically butch lesbians ever do, and which together with the electrolysis-rash comprises the only real chink in the operative’s distaff persona, and would require an almost professionally hypervigilant and suspicious person to notice the significance of.

[277] Trois-Rivières-region idiom, meaning basically ‘reason to get out of bed in the morning.’

[278] Where was Mrs. Pemulis all this time, late at night, with dear old Da P. shaking Matty ‘awake’ until his teeth rattled and little Micky curled up against the far wall, shell-breathing, silent as death, is what I’d want to know.

[279] The kid’s the former E.T.A. whose name keeps eluding and torturing Hal, who hasn’t gone over twenty-four hours without getting high in secret for well over a year, and doesn’t feel very good at all, and finds the kid’s name’s elusiveness infuriating.

[280] Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century Psychologic des Sentiments says he means it to denote the psychoequivalent of analgesia, which is the neurologic suppression of pain.

[281] This had been one of Hal’s deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he’d come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.

[282] (the big reason why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be around)

[283] S.S.R.I.s, of which Zoloft and the ill-fated Prozac were the ancestors.

[284] A crude and cheap form of combustible methedrine, favored by the same sort of addictive class that sniffs gasoline fumes or coats the inside of a paper bag with airplane glue and puts the bag over their face and breathes until they fall down and start to convulse.

[285] This has got to be a mispronunciation or catachresis on R.v.C.’s part, since Clonidine — 2-(2,6-Dichloroanilino)-2-imidazoline — is a decidedly adult-strength anti-hypertensive; the infant’d have to be N.F.L.-sized to tolerate it.

[286] Kate G.’s never done Ice, or crack/’base/crank, nor even cocaine or low-impact ‘drines. Drug addicts tend to fall into different classes: those who like downs and Mr. Hope rarely enjoy stimulants, while coke- and ‘drine-fiends as a rule abhor marijuana. This is an area of potentially fruitful study in addictionology. Note that pretty much every class of addicts drinks, though.

[287] Since last winter, when a stale smell, litter of dental stimulators, and single slender spit-wet butt signified that a certain upperclassman had been smoking panatelas late at night in V.R.3.

[288] The Continent’s Best Yogurt®.

[289] In point of a fact wholly unknown to Hal, BS: OTN was in fact a very sad self-hate-festival on Himself’s part, a veiled allegory of sponsorship and Himself’s own miserable distaste for the vacant grins and reductive platitudes of the Boston AA that M.D.s and counselors kept referring him to.

[290] Whether the girl’s hideous facial burn-scars are the result of a freebase accident is never made explicit in the film. Bernadette Longley says she kind of hopes that’s the case, because otherwise the scars would function as symbols of some deeper and more spiritual wound/hideousness, and the symbolic equation of facial with moral deformity strikes everybody over thirteen in the room as terribly gooey and heavy and stock.

[291] After a heyday during the pre-millennial self-help craze, CA’s receded back to being a splinter of the still-enormous Narcotics Anonymous; and Pat Montesian and the Ennet House Staff, while they have nothing against a resident with cocaine-issues hitting the occasional CA venue, strongly suggest that residents stick with AA or NA and not make splinters like CA or Designer Drug Addicts Anonymous or Prescription Tranquilizers Anonymous their primary fellowship for recovery, mostly because the splinters tend to have way fewer Groups and meetings — and some none at all in certain parts of the U.S. — and because their extremely specific Substance-focus tends to narrow the aperture of recovery and focus too much on abstinence from just one Substance instead of complete sobriety and a new spiritual way of life in toto.